It’s a sure thing that the iPad will get a camera in its second generation. After all, there’s already an empty, iSight-shaped slot in the iPad’s frame, and it’s pretty much a sure thing that both the next iPhone and iPod Touch will have a camera. It would be absurd if the iPad didn’t get one soon as well.

Apple must be thinking the same thing. Over at their official site, Apple has posted an employment opportunity for a performance QA engineer to work on still and video capture in the iPad Media department.

The posting reads in full: “The Media Systems team is looking for a software quality engineer with a strong technical background to test still, video and audio capture and playback frameworks. Build on your QA experience and knowledge of digital camera technology (still and video) to develop and maintain testing frameworks for both capture and playback pipelines…Experience with tuning of and image pipeline, including, but not limited to AWB, Color Correction, AutoExposure, FrameRate adjustments is a plus.”

My big question is not if the iPad will get a camera, but when. Will Apple update the iPad along with the iPhone and iPod Touch, at least to plug a camera in there? If they dot, this could be a very abbreviated first generation for Apple’s new tablet.

About the author

John Brownlee is a Contributing Editor. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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